Meet Umesh Kumar Roy, who is a Senior Technical Architect at HCL Technologies, and was a part of the GCD, 2020 batch at Accredian. He shares his journey of achieving success and how he transitioned from vast roles into working at HCL at a Senior position. Get to know more about him as he guides us through this amazing process.
Watch his interview right here:
Q1. Tell us about your current role and background.
Hi I am Umesh and I’m working as a senior technical architect with HCL Technologies. I have been working with HCl Tech, as senior technical architect, for over a year.
If you look at my career graph, there has been a wide transition from an application developer, to data engineer and then moved on to become a technical architect, precisely Data Architect.
In my career, I had an opportunity to work on diverse domains, like their own inventory, financial accounting, US healthcare insurance, and population health.
Q2. What challenges did you face while switching to Data Science?
To begin with, I already started my journey with big data. But I was not really interested, due to the lack of support and planning of the team with whom I was working. So I started to look for other options.
Luckily, I was just attending one of the webinars and Accredian was hosting it. And specially Manav or Manvender Singh, CEO of Accredian, was actually hosting that event.
I was enthralled to know and understand the nuances of data that can change the business of an organization, how it can augment the business with the meaningful insight that data science can bring in. So I was really excited by that.
I thought about choosing data science as my career path. So I was facing a challenge. While I was working on big data, which was also booming in the market, on the contrary, I was also evaluating data science as another option. With this dilemma of transitioning or not, making the decision was very challenging.
Q3. How has Data Science helped you in your new role?
I was very enthralled when I came to know how data science can drive the business or with its meaningful insights that can be drawn from different machine learning models or advanced AI. So I just inclined towards learning and embracing this technology.
I enrolled with Accredian and luckily, the day when I started my journey on data science COVID sowed its footprints, and we were allowed to work from home. So there I got the chance to fully utilize or leverage the time to step into the journey of data science.
And from there, it was the beginning from where I picked up machine learning models.
Q4. What was the interview like at your current company?
Currently, I’m working as a senior technical architect on big data, and using cloud technologies like AWS. So it was really tricky and challenging. I had two rounds of technical interviews and one HR round to be precise.
I have had many interviews from which I could pick up on my mistakes, like everybody was asking, what was the practical scenario, which I have worked on?
So I think I just started with whatever the data pipelines are of the practical scenarios that I have faced a lot of the challenges that I’ve come across that I tried to highlight, and which actually caught the attention of the interviewer.
And he just went into depth of other technologies which I was able to answer correctly and to his satisfaction, so which actually bagged me this job.
Q5. Why Accredian? How did it help you?
So I was already into the path forward with big data, I was working on big data. Now, due to the lack of support from the management, the company’s planning was not going well with my career goals.
At that point in time, I just decided to move on with data science. And, I also finished two semesters out here completing GCD, Global Certification in Data Science. I was stuck on deciding whether I should be moving on to the Advanced Data Science curriculums, or I should really retrace back to big data because both the tech domains are very vast.
So at that point in time, I called up Manvender Singh personally. He, out of his busy schedule, spent one hour trying to understand what I’m currently going through, and what should be the way forward.
He made me understand that moving on to the data science domain, right from this juncture, will be a little tricky for me and challenging since I was already working on big data, and I already had the practical exposure.
He suggested me to get into the cutting edge technologies like Spark, and bag the job, test the success. So why I liked Accredian is because Accredian has been very instrumental in my career achieving this goal to me.
Manav insisted me to press back and be on the Big Data Domain. And he always insisted that he wanted me to be successful.
The primary focus of any CEO of an EdTech would have been to draw the attention of his students to take up Advanced course, but on the contrary, instructed me to to dropout from the data science curriculum for the time being, come back again when the time permits, and stay back on big data so that I can test the success since I had the practical skill set.
Q6. What advice would you give to Data Science Beginners?
My one advice to the Data Science beginners would be that perseverance is the key. Whenever you are learning something you should learn with the attitude that whatever you are learning, how are you going to utilize it in the business context or what problem that technology you are learning is going to solve.
So, you should be adhering to that. And my one advice will be that you should be sticking to practicing all the assignments honestly, so that you can achieve whatever you want and you should very religiously follow the instructions, what is being given by the instructors and you should religiously also try to explore the things go to the different blogs, white papers that are being advised by by your mentors. That will actually help you move forward in your career.
I would like to thank Manav once more. He has been very instrumental in helping me decide about Big Data because I was very inclined towards making it to data science and that was really challenging.
It would have taken time. He helped me come across this roller coaster ride and he correctly guided me that I should be sticking to the Big Data domain and later on to explore data sets. A very, very big thanks to Manav for helping me out.
We hope you found this success story interesting. If you have any Product Management questions, please fill this form and we will get back to you.
